


Quebrando a Barreira do Som

by PunkHazard



Series: Synaesthesia [7]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 15:01:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8805412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunkHazard/pseuds/PunkHazard
Summary: Lúcio makes it two steps forward before something snaps shut on his leg, metal teeth biting half an inch into the reinforced metal of his skates. A second later he's slammed into the brick wall of the alley, ears ringing, vision clouded by smoke and dust.





	

Bank robberies aren’t usually left to technically illegal international task forces to investigate, but when it involves a pair of fugitives with multi-million dollar bounties on their heads, maybe there’s some merit to it. Hanzo had also not-so-discreetly mentioned at the last State of the Overwatch meeting that the newly-reformed organization is in dire need of some sort of income, so Lúcio can _maybe_ understand why Winston dispatched a team to track them down.

It had been fairly recent, an explosion disabling the vault’s digital lock, one Mako “Roadhog” Rutledge relieving several safety deposit boxes of jewelry and unmarked cash while Jamison “Junkrat” Fawkes went to secure a getaway vehicle. Winston had tracked their activities to Florida, triangulating likely targets and preparing teams to deploy to each. He’d assigned D.Va, Genji and Lúcio to this particular bank, the narrow alleys behind it and complicated architecture of the street well-suited to agents with higher mobility. Besides, they work well together.

Genji and Hana corner Roadhog behind the bank, Genji occasionally ducking behind Hana’s mech to avoid a faceful of buckshot. Lúcio ignores their earlier insistence to stay close once they seem to have a handle on the situation, holding the criminal at bay until Hanzo, Zenyatta and McCree (stationed at a bank half a mile away) can come to back them up. In the meantime he ducks out of a hole in the bank’s back wall, smaller than the main explosion but deliberately placed.

He’s not exactly a stranger to bank robberies, having never participated in one but seen the aftermath of several, though none so flashy. Lúcio follows the sound of an engine revving– an obsolete mechanism in most cars other than for the nostalgia factor– and steps into the dim, dingy alleyway. He glimpses a figure limping around a corner and takes off after, skidding to a stop and watching as Junkrat’s gangly figure clambers onto a motorcycle. Lúcio makes it two steps forward before something snaps shut on his leg, metal teeth biting half an inch into the reinforced metal of his skates.

A second later he’s slammed into the brick wall of the alley, ears ringing, vision clouded by smoke and dust. Lúcio hits the ground hard, barely able to catch himself, debris clogging his nose and throat. Genji’s voice crackles into his ear as his hearing returns, faint under the sound of shouting, calls to group up and get out.

Urdu and Portuguese.

Lúcio pushes himself up on his scraped elbows, concrete hard against his hip, the alley still fogged with powdered concrete. Shadowy figures stumble through the smoke– one toward him, hands closing around his shoulder and upper arm. Unthinking, Lúcio presses a palm to the ground and pivots on his knee. He notes absently that the rest of his leg seems to be missing so he swings the other around, slamming his shin into the man who’d grabbed him.

Genji grunts, his voice in Lúcio’s receiver oddly synchronized with the shape he had kicked away, now on its back on the other side of the alley.

“Genji?” Lúcio gasps, hopping on his remaining leg to regain his balance, the hard light blade sputtering out. As the smoke clears, Genji rolls to his feet, clutching his shoulder. “Are you alright?” Lúcio asks, eyes fixing on the crack in armor, almost definitely from the impact of his skate.

“Fine,” Genji answers, coming toward him but stopping just out of reach. “What happened?”

“I saw Fawkes jump onto a motorbike,” Lúcio rattles off, staggering forward until Genji catches him by the arm, supporting his weight, “he’s probably looping around the block. Try to delay Roadhog and maybe we can bag him when he comes back.”

“Sorry hyung,” D.Va says, the sound of her mech falling to pieces in the background, “he just took off! I can’t go after him until another mech gets here.”

“Where are they heading?” Genji asks, slinging one arm around Lúcio’s waist and straightening.

Hana growls in frustration. “In Zarya and Mei's direction,” she says, “I’m calling them now.”

“Alright,” answers Lúcio, “let’s go back ‘em up.”

Genji doesn’t move, his grip tightening around Lúcio when he tries to go forward. “I think you are finished for today,” he says gently, crouching to inspect the skates where one side had been torn off just below his knee. “Leave this to the others.”

“No, we can still–”

“Lúcio. Stop.”

Lúcio looks down at his trembling hands, blinking as Genji stands and his arms curl around his shoulders, steadying him against a smooth metal chest. Lúcio tucks his head under Genji’s chin, breathes, quickly taking stock of the situation– his leg blown off, elbows a mess, equipment wasted. Whether or not the others catch up to Fawkes and Rutledge, he’s down for the count. Switching off his comms, Lúcio looks up, frowning slightly when Genji’s visor stares back. “You’re gonna catch up to the others?” he asks, finding himself unnerved, now more used to seeing Genji’s face than his mask.

“No. Let’s return to base.”

“I’ll be a little slow,” Lúcio quips, managing a shaky laugh.

“Genji is with you,” comes the soft reply, one hand settling on the back of Lúcio’s neck.

As if on cue D.Va’s mech stomps around the corner, her face sympathetic behind the glass panel of the cockpit. “Need a lift?” Hana offers, crouching slightly to allow Lúcio access to the handholds on the side of her suit. “You too, sunbae. Make sure he doesn’t fall off.”

* * *

“You,” says Genji, supporting Lúcio by the arm as they hobble into his dingy room at the run-down motel Winston’d temporarily set the teams up in, “should let Dr. Ziegler check you over.” He doesn’t insist as Lúcio breaks away from him, hopping forward on one leg with surprising grace considering the weight of his skates. He shortens the hops close to the edge of the bed, pivots on his heel and drops shoulder-first to the mattress.

“Nah I’m alright,” Lúcio says, peeling off his gloves, hands working at the latches on his hip. “Help me get these off, though. Switch is busted.”

Genji does, carefully slipping the exoshell off as Lúcio lifts his hips. Setting the skates aside, he shifts, one leg sliding under Lúcio’s thighs, fingers exploring the jagged, twisted edges of one knee hinge. He curls the metal inward to prevent Lúcio from accidentally cutting himself, cyborg fingers making quick work of lightweight aluminum. “The socket has been damaged as well,” Genji tells him, reaching under the bed for Lúcio’s legs and fitting one into place.

“Yeah,” Lúcio sighs, pushing himself up on his elbows to take a look at the damage before he lets himself flop back down, “I’ll have to see if there’s spare parts lying around.”

“Torbjörn could probably fix it,” Genji suggests, stowing the remaining prosthetic and inspecting Lúcio’s organic leg for damage instead. “You could also refer to him for parts.”

“Yeah, but I don’t really wanna go to him for help.” Lúcio absently undoes the clip in his hair, shaking his locs loose, and he doesn’t catch Genji looking at him in surprise. He’s rarely so candid about his uncharitable thoughts, but Lúcio continues with a pointed look in Genji’s direction. “I know you don’t like him either.”

“He is rude to my master,” says Genji, carefully neutral. The man’s distrust of omnics aside, he could at least _try_  and muster a scrap of respect for a teammate. Still, Lúcio’s never said out loud that he actively avoids Torbjörn before, obvious though he is about it. “Are you all right?”

Lúcio doesn’t seem to hear the question, leaning forward to pry a loose cable out of his knee joint, thumbing at a bit of stripped wiring. “Think I can fit my leg over this,” he says out loud, less a question to Genji than a stray thought to himself.

“Maybe,” answers Genji anyway, “but it will not function properly.”

“Lemme try.” Hanging half-off the edge of the bed to retrieve his other prosthetic, Lúcio angles it to fit the warped hinge. He flicks a switch to initiate the connection, but abruptly jerks his leg up, hands flying to the joint and flipping it off. “Hey,” he gasps, motioning for Genji to back off at the cyborg’s alarmed body language, “okay, maybe not.”

“What happened?”

Lúcio frowns, brows drawing together as he regards the busted hinge, as if he might be able to fix it with a few seconds of tinkering instead of the involved process it actually will be. “I got shocked,” he answers after a long silence, eyes trained on the socket. “Man, that really didn’t work.”

Genji reaches into the bedside drawer to extract a roll of electrical tape as Lúcio takes off his leg and dejectedly shoves it back under the bed. “We can seal the loose wires,” he murmurs, voice a low, calm monotone as he finds the loose end of tape and pries it off the roll. His HUD hones in on the sparks of electricity indicating damaged circuitry, deft fingers seeking them out and carefully binding them with insulated tape. “You can fix it properly tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” answers Lúcio, his expression blank as he regards Genji’s visor, brows furrowing slightly as if he doesn’t quite recognize him. “Guess I’ll have to.”

Genji obligingly removes his headgear, smiling slightly in response to the tension draining from the set of Lúcio’s shoulders, the drawn, tight look on his face relaxing. He rarely takes off his visor on assignment, few places in the world outside of Nepal and Gibraltar remote or secure enough to feel comfortable doing so, but he banks on Lúcio not being awake for very long. Genji leans in, pressing his lips briefly to Lúcio’s temple and pushing him onto his back. “Rest,” he says. “I will be here.”

* * *

Lúcio’s out for about an hour (which Genji spends pacing around the room, spamming Tracer and Zenyatta for mission updates) before he stirs again, tossing a few times before he curls into a ball, a quiet groan emanating from his pile of blankets. Genji’s at his side immediately, his visor removed and set aside, pulling back the corner of the covers to reveal a grimace.

“Lúcio?”

Lúcio looks up at him, brows furrowed in pain. “It feels like my leg is burning,” he says, voice shaky, both hands clutching his thigh, nails digging into the groove where skin ends and the augmented socket begins. Genji knows he hadn’t missed an injury, and both Zenyatta and Mercy are in the field; Lúcio’s amplifier was badly damaged in the explosion as well, so he carefully pulls Lúcio’s hands aside and digs the heels of his palms into the taut, hard muscle of Lúcio’s thigh. He massages until they relax, Lúcio’s breath coming slower and easier with the contact. “Is this better?”

“A bit,” answers Lúcio, sounding suddenly evasive, as if he’s about to imply something ridiculous, “but it’s not– it doesn’t hurt there.”

“The part you lost, you mean.”

“Yeah.”

“That happens,” Genji says simply.

“It feels like it’s still there,” Lúcio mutters. He’s no stranger to sensation from phantom limbs, plenty of information about it common knowledge after the Omnic Crisis. “I mean, there’s feedback with the prosthetics too, but this hasn’t bothered me in a long time.”

Genji lets a long silence pass, his hands still working on Lúcio’s leg, before he finally asks, “Do you, ah. Have the unit that you built for me?”

He braces for a joke, some cheeky comment that Lúcio’s flattered though it isn’t really the time, but he only gets a blank look. “Uh, yeah. Why?”

Genji goes to the duffel bag Lúcio brought to Florida, rifling through it until he turns up the little machine. “While I was recovering,” he says, fiddling with its settings and attaching the electrodes to Lúcio’s leg, “this was the only thing that would help. It scrambles the signals coming from your nerves.”

“Oh, right.” For once, he has nothing to add.

Genji’s in no mood, either, to explain how in the weeks after Mercy had stabilized him and begun the process of cyberization he’d laid in a hospital bed, all of his missing, removed and damaged limbs throbbing with pressure and pain. She’d avoided medication, knowing the dosage would be fatal if she left him to his own devices with a dispenser, but the TENS units could only be effective for so long. When he’d hit the amperage limit and asked her to raise it, Angela told him that any higher and he’d fry his entire nervous system.

Lúcio lays back, still crashing from the initial rush of adrenaline. Genji settles next to him on the edge of the mattress and pulls the covers back up to his shoulders. Lúcio doesn’t show any signs of wanting to go back to sleep and Genji sighs, brushing a stray loc out of his face, briefly wondering if he should remind him to wrap them as he usually does. “How did you lose them?” Genji asks. “Your legs.”

“When I broke into Vishkar for what, the third time, their turrets got me above the knees.” Lúcio turns his face into Genji’s touch, reaching for his wrist and holding on tight. His speech is slow, tired. “I just wrapped it up and thought it’d heal but they got infected somehow. Got really sick after a while, and my guys had me flown out of Brazil to get it treated 'cause no hospital wanted anything to do with me after what went down. When I came out of it, they were already amputated.”

“Why… didn’t you get treatment sooner?”

Lúcio laughs, pulling Genji’s hand to cover his eyes. “I was _sad_ , Genji.” He’d learned his lesson about Vishkar security after his first break-in, but the company had adapted to his movements with atypical speed; he hadn’t been particularly careful after the first time, either. “People do a lot of stupid shit when they’re sad.”

Genji doesn’t dispute it, the implication of Lúcio’s words clear enough: he’d just lost his best friend. How much worse could it have gotten? “I know,” he says, and leaves it at that.

“I need a shower,” Lúcio mumbles, releasing Genji’s hand and sitting up.

“Not before your leg is repaired.”

Lúcio’s shoulders slump when Genji moves for the bathroom, but they perk back up when he returns, a hot washcloth in hand. Catching it, he briefly cleans the abrasions on his face, his neck and arms. Genji produces a change of clothes next, then retrieves a bottle of water while Lúcio strips out of the tank top and compression shorts he wears into the field.

Accepting the water, Lúcio balefully regards the flat stretch of blanket where his leg should be.

“Mercy should be back soon,” Genji tells him, following his gaze. “I can ask her to lend a few nanobots. All of your spare equipment is still in Gibraltar.”

Lúcio takes a long drink, eyes narrowed. “Maybe,” he says.

“I can understand Torbjörn,” Genji comments lightly, “but Angela?”

“Yeah,” Lúcio answers, looking sideways at him, “there’s a little thing called informed consent that I don’t think Mercy’s ever heard of.”

They’ve touched on this topic before but Lúcio’s always been friendly toward Mercy, cheerfully absorbing whatever information on medicine and cybernetics she’s willing to share. Genji’s no stranger to civility for the sake of maintaining the peace, but as far as he knows she’s never tried any wildly unethical experiments on Lúcio so it must be about him. “I,” he says cautiously, “agreed to the procedure.”

That’s usually enough to end the conversation– this time Lúcio frowns, his eyes fixed on something far behind Genji rather than on him. “You agreed,” he drawls, “or you were told you agreed?”

“There is video footage.”

“And how many painkillers were you on?”

Genji ignores the dull buzz in his ears that starts whenever he has to think for longer than a second about his cyberization. “Regardless,” he answers, “Lúcio, I am glad for the decision that was made. If it weren’t for Dr. Ziegler, I would not have lived to meet you.”

Baring his teeth, Lúcio taps a finger against Genji’s chest. “Don’t think you can turn this back on me just 'cause you’re cute.”

“You think I’m cute?”

“I’m serious, Genji. What happened to you wasn’t okay.”

“Go to sleep, Lúcio.” Genji shifts, sitting angled so he can pull Lúcio’s residual knee into his lap and start dismantling the hinge. He pulls it up, using the leverage to tip Lúcio onto his back. “I will work on your leg.”

Throwing one arm over his eyes, Lúcio allows Genji to continue removing broken pieces of metal, torn and fraying wires. He’d designed the joint himself, customizing a relatively old model to interface with the Vishkar-era tech of his skates. It hadn’t been easy to do, Lúcio being neither a certified doctor nor engineer, but he’d tapped a few mechanic friends for help adjusting suspension, and the rest he’d researched himself. Genji has the schematics, his expression of incredulous awe upon seeing them still fresh in Lúcio’s mind.

He normally wouldn’t trust maintenance or repair to anyone else, but he’s seen Ryuu Ichimonji’s circuitry, glimpsed over Genji’s shoulder, the careful fit and design of each component so different from his own work. ('Prototype?’ Genji’d said upon being asked, sounding pained, 'I set out to make the finished product from the beginning. It would not have worked otherwise.’)

He’s not sure how much time passes since he was last told him to sleep, but a whiff of rubbing alcohol pulls Lúcio’s focus back, Genji having moved on from his knee to turning his arm, probably inspecting the scrapes on his elbow. He snorts, uncovering his eyes. “You straight up just got distracted, didn’t you?”

“I,” Genji answers, pressing the cottonball soaked in antiseptic to the open wound on Lúcio’s elbow and swabbing it out, “am waiting for the others to return. One more.”

“Ow,” Lúcio complains halfheartedly as Genji picks up his other arm and does the same to it, “ow, hey– thanks, I guess.”

For a while, both of them fall silent. Lúcio stares at the ceiling, tracing a crack from one corner of the room to the other and back. When he finally thinks to check again, Genji’s sitting in a meditative silence beside him, the whir of his systems filling the room in quiet harmony with the buzz of a creaky motel air conditioning unit. Shifting, Lúcio slings one leg across Genji’s lap, drawing an indulgent smile, one eye cracking open.

“Have I ever told you,” Genji asks, catching his foot and drawing his thumb down the metal sole, “how beautiful you are?”

“I already knew,” Lúcio says, “but you could stand to say it more. What’s up with you, anyway?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not usually… this nice?”

Genji cants his head to the side, putting on a mildly offended expression. “I am nice all the time.”

“But you don’t say stuff like this,” Lúcio points out, tapping his foot once against the armor over Genji’s abdomen. “You have that _look_ , but you don’t say it so much.”

“I don’t know, Lúcio.” Genji stretches out next to him when Lúcio gestures for him to move closer, propping himself up on one arm. He extends his other hand, waiting for Lúcio to catch it and place it himself. “You could have died.”

Lúcio idly plays with his fingers, curling and uncurling each of them, running his fingers along the seams in Genji’s palm lining. “ _You_ almost die every time we’ve got an assignment,” he points out, jaw jutting forward. He bends Genji’s wrist back, then bumps his arm to simulate the flick he uses to reload. Genji catches three shuriken as the panel on his forearm slides open and spits the stars out, brows cocking as Lúcio takes one and allows him to store the rest.

“I can be put back together,” Genji answers, as if emphasizing what Lúcio had just demonstrated. He watches the younger man fit the star between his index and middle fingers as he does, hefting it slightly as if surprised by its weight.

“Well technically,” drawls Lúcio, testing each sharp edge, lightly pressing the points into the soft pad of his thumb, “so can I.”

Reaching across, Genji ignores the slight frown Lúcio gives him as he covers the smaller hand with his own, moving organic fingers away from his weapon’s edges and into a proper grip. “The thought that you might go through what I did,” he says softly, flicking both their wrists so the star spins out and embeds itself into the ceiling crack, “is unacceptable to me.”

Lúcio stares at the shuriken, at their hands as Genji folds his fingers into his palm to form a loose fist, then at his face– the tired set of his mouth, scars that still throb and ache when the weather changes too quickly. “But you’re so ready to be fine with what happened to you,” he sighs, reaching up to cup Genji’s cheek, thumb landing on the bridge of his nose to swipe across an old burn.

Genji pulls his hand away and leans down, pressing a kiss to Lúcio’s forehead. “Go to sleep, Lúcio,” he says, swinging his legs out of bed and standing. “I will be back.”

* * *

An alarm set for 7AM pulls Lúcio from sleep– the first time in months that it’d been his phone instead of Genji. He sits up, digs a crusty particle from his eye and looks around the room, mildly jarred by how unfamiliar and dim it is. Genji sleeps next to him, cross-legged with his back against the headboard. One bare shoulder rises and falls in time to his breathing, synthetic muscle almost mesmerizing as it shifts and flexes.

Lúcio’s eyes flicker to the now-vacant bedside table where Genji had left the pieces of his knee joint after dismantling it. Turning back the covers, he grins at the sight of both prosthetic legs equipped, one to a lighter-colored hinge but feeding back all the correct signals.

“How does it feel?” Genji asks, his eyes cracking open, words still slurred with sleep and exhaustion. “I finished while you were asleep, and it may be weighted differently. But until we return to Gibraltar, it should do.”

“Feels right,” Lúcio answers, reaching for Genji’s hand and squeezing his fingers. “How late did you stay up?”

“What time is it?”

“Seven.”

“Too late to be awake at seven,” Genji tells him.

Lúcio regards the shoulder again, reaching forward to touch. The armor on his other side is intact, but Genji lets him pinch and squeeze the pliant fibers without complaint. Racking his brains for some sort of reason for the asymmetry, Lúcio blanches as yesterday’s memories flood back. “Genji,” he says, shaking him slightly by the shoulder, “I kicked you. Are you alright? Is your arm–”

“You did not damage my arm,” answers Genji, a wry smile on his face, as if he was expecting this, “and I have spare bracers.”

Lúcio blinks, brows furrowing. Genji could easily have repaired his armor, the crack in it relatively minor. Capoeira’s kicks aren’t strong enough to _really_ have an effect on carbon fiber alloyed with titanium. “What happened to your gear?” he asks, squeezing the synthetic muscle again, trying to touch it as much as he can before Genji hides it under his equipment again.

“I asked Torbjörn to use it to reconstruct the parts of your knee that could not be repaired from the scraps.” Sounding very proud of himself for his resourcefulness, Genji leans forward and brushes his lips across Lúcio’s cheek. “I was the one who reassembled it, however.”

Lúcio’s mouth falls open, staying that way until Genji cups his chin and gently closes it. “You didn’t have to do that,” he says. “I could’ve dealt with it.”

“I wanted to, Lúcio.”

Shaking his head as if to clear it, Lúcio scoots closer and nestles himself under Genji’s arm, tucking his head under the cyborg’s chin. “The junkers?” he asks, full interrogation mode activating.

“They escaped, but Winston put a tracker on them. We should be able to follow up once we have all regrouped.”

That resolved, Lúcio pouts, crossing his legs under him. “You didn’t wake me up for the debriefing.”

“Winston sent everyone a report,” Genji recites, bracing for the whirlwind of questions and activity, “but there was no meeting.”

“I know you don’t like talking about when you joined Overwatch.” Lúcio moves effortlessly on, picking up Genji’s hand and squeezing it in apology, “I shouldn’t’ve brought it up.”

“You weren’t wrong, but perhaps we should wait for a more convenient time to discuss it more.”

“That thing with the orgasm machine,” Lúcio continues, turning a hard stare on him. “Genius.”

“I learned from the best,” Genji laughs, “but do you have to call it that?”

“Genji,” Lúcio says, expression breaking into a wide, sweet grin, “coração.”

“Yes?”

“You’re the best, y'know that?”

Genji drops his forehead to Lúcio’s shoulder, the vents on his shoulders popping open. After a brief silence punctuated by a continuous hiss he looks up, grinning mischievously in response to Lúcio’s soft laugh. “You could stand to say it more,” he quips, turning and curling his arms around Lúcio’s waist as he launches himself into Genji’s chest, knocking him onto his back.

“I would,” Lúcio sighs, bonelessly draped across a hard metal torso, breath hot against Genji’s jaw, “but I think you already know.”

**Author's Note:**

> written on a prompt from @ooorangy on tumblr, who draws beautiful art and enables me in rarepair hell :') i hope i make it as fun for you as you do for me


End file.
